“Taking Time" – an international video exhibition on Democracy

McDaniel College's Department of Art and Art History presents “Taking Time," an international video exhibition on Democracy, October 4 through November 2 in The Rice Gallery in Peterson Hall.

What links the Fiat factory in Turin, the protected island of Tegel lake in Berlin and the former Copenhagen military base? By presenting three artistic positions, approaching three social experiments, this exhibition focuses on the process of democratic construction. Have there been ideas and practices in the past that might be worth rethinking? Can the experience of past practices give new impulses for the future?

Also in the exhibit are works by NY Artist, Thomas Lail, whose silkscreen paintings and sculptures examine our persistent strivings and ideological failings in pursuit of a better world. Lail’s works reference fragments of images of hippie communes, high modern architecture, protesting crowds and Edenic floral patterns often reproduced to degraded obscurity. Lail's images suggest both the fleeting physical presence and philosophical space of such Utopian enclaves, their once-dreamed-future and the tumultuous moments that give rise to such dreams.

Thomas Lail exhibits in the United States and internationally. He performs and records with experimental music duo soundBarn and the multi-member Location Ensemble. Lail publishes poetry and experimental writing through soundBarn Press and has written numerous reviews and essays including two catalogue essays on the work of Robert Longo. Lail holds degrees from The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY and the University at Albany, SUNY. Since 1993, Lail has taught drawing and painting at Hudson Valley Community College, SUNY in Troy, NY where he is Professor of Fine Arts and a recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor's Award. He lives and works in a bricolage former-tractor barn on what was once Heald Orchards in Kinderhook, NY with artist Tara Fracalossi and their son, Coltrane.​

Organizer Izabel Galliera serves as the director of McDaniel College’s Esther Prangley Rice Gallery, an exhibition space for the College’s students and other emerging contemporary artists from the mid-Atlantic region and beyond. Galliera, an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history and theory at McDaniel, is bringing "Taking Time" from Berlin for "Art Power: Land, Labor, and Living in Moments of Crisis – A Creative Time Satellite Cross-Disciplinary Biennial Conference," a two-day conference in conjunction with the exhibit.

The Rice Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and Saturday from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The exhibit is free and open to the public. For information and to confirm gallery hours, please call 410-857-2595.